Conventional search engines receive a search query from a user and execute a search against a global index. Such conventional search engines typically use one or more conventional methods for performing a search. For example, one known method, described in an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, assigns a degree of importance to a document, such as a web page, based on the link structure of the web page. The search results are often presented in a list format, comprising article identifiers and brief snippets about the documents in a web page that can be resized.
In a conventional user interface, the window comprising the search results may be layered on top of other windows or may be covered by other windows, or may reduce the space available for other windows. In either case, information that may be of interest to the user is obscured. In order to avoid the visual interference in the user interface, the user can manually adjust attributes of the display, such as the position and size of a window, to alleviate interference between windows.
A conventional interface may also provide a capability to adjust the relation of all windows displayed in the interface. For example, in the Microsoft® Windows environment, windows in the interface may be layered, cascaded, or arranged so that the windows together fill the display area.
A need exists to provide an improved system and method for automatically determining an attribute of a user interface.